Grass: 1, Me: 0

Okay, I give up. I’m crying ‘Uncle’. I’m tossing in my chips and hanging up my hat. The Bermuda grass has won. It has seeped into, and infected, my entire front yard. There is no denying it is the dominant vegetative growth out there. Forget the vegetables and my poor little flowers. The Bermuda has ruined all of my beds and has choked out many of my plantings.

A couple of weeks ago, Jason was lamenting about the grass. That’s a really nice way of putting it. What really happened is that he was having to weedeat the front yard YET AGAIN and lost it. Or maybe I should say he tossed it, because he threw the weedeater, and I do mean he slung it while screaming obscenities, across the yard. I can only hope that the muffler burned a few blades of Bermuda grass in retaliation. It was all about the grass.

Ten minutes later, he came back to the front yard. I was (YET AGAIN) weeding and wisely had kept my head down and mouth shut during his grass tirade.

J: I have been weedeating for 25 years and I’m not doing it ANYMORE! NOT ANYMORE! (How I would love to see a photo of him with a weedeater held high above his head with a caption that read: AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER WEEDEAT AGAIN”)

Me: Okay, well, you’re a fix-it type person, so figure out what we need to do.

It’s a very hard thing to look at all of the work you put into something and realize you have to scrap it. I think about all of the hours of planting, laying the brick path, making the beds, putting up the fence…and weeding. Endless hours of ripping up grass. I’ll be starting over at Square One, yet again, four years after moving in. Still, there is also a part of me that is very excited. True, everything we did will pretty much be going down the toilet, but we get to start fresh. With no grass this time.

So, we’ll be tearing out the beds, fence, paths, timbers, arbor, and then using a box blade on the tractor to take it all back to sand. My front yard is going to look like a sand pit for about 6 months. I am giving us a 6 month break from our yard. Well, kind of. I’ll still have to yank out the errant weeds, but at least there will be no need for weedeating, anyway. I’m not sure Jason could handle that anymore.

We will stockpile the compost in the raised beds and I’ll have the fun and exciting job of picking out every sprig of Bermuda I can find. FUN TIMES. Then, instead of raised beds, we are going to do direct planting from here on out. The Bermuda just uses the frames as a hiding spot, and I can’t get it all out. So no more raised beds for us.

Wish us luck. We’re gonna need it. But at least there won’t be any more flying weedwhackers on our farm.